Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Well, you know.”

“No. What?”

“It’s a disinfectant.”

Sara couldn’t help it, she let loose of the laugh that had been building inside for the last five minutes. She pulled herself together and cleared her throat. “I mean, this must stop, immediately.”

They knew her, and they laughed. PO Barnette’s ire was soothed, even if his hand had not been the one to mete out justice, and he returned to his brace at the conn, feet flat against the deck as if they’d been spot-welded there, hands clasped at the small of his back, leaning forward into the pitch of the ship. Salty, that was PO Barnette, eighteen years in. He never lost his balance, not even in the heaviest seas, as opposed to Sara, who had long ago perfected a complicated polka slash tango with the ship on any seas over three feet. It was effective; it had been years since the sudden lurch of a hull had tossed her into a bulkhead, but still she envied PO Barnette’s tranquil stolidity.

The bosun’s mate, Thomasina Penn, went back to the plot table to continue work on their route, but it was perfunctory as they were running box ops, hiding from a hurricane-force low in the lee of St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs. Running box ops meant steering a course confined within a box drawn on the radar screen that out of sheer boredom on occasion resembled the initials of the officer on watch. The S for Sara was fun, the L in Lange less so.

Mark Edelen’s initials were more challenging, resulting in a call to the bridge earlier that evening from the captain requesting the conn to straighten out their course so his dominoes wouldn’t keep sliding off the wardroom table. It was the threat of being drafted into playing dominoes that had caused Sara to retreat to the bridge in the first place.

As executive officer, she was exempt from watch rotation, but truth to tell, she missed it. She missed the heave and roll of the sea at night, more pronounced on the bridge thirty-six feet up from the waterline than it was in her stateroom two decks below. She missed the occasional glimpses of white as the bow sliced through the ocean. On clear nights it was horizon to horizon stars, crowding one another in three hundred and sixty degrees of sheer glory.

Nights like tonight. On nights like tonight, it was as if they were sailing straight off the edge of the earth and into the cosmos. Nights when the moon came up or the aurora came out verged on the paranormal.

On the night watch voices were muted, lights were softer to the eye, and the seas seemed somehow less severe no matter the height of the wave or the length between swells. At night, things were a little less formal and a little more friendly. Sara loved her job and she loved the Coast Guard, but executive officer was just another description for captain’s hatchet man. It could get pretty lonely, especially since she was the only female officer. Being one of only eleven women in a crew of a hundred didn’t help.

Promotion to executive officer was not anything an ambitious officer in the United States Coast Guard refused, not if she were in her right mind, but as XO her days with filled with administrative minutiae and a lamentable lack of action. Logistics made the boat go, she understood that, but instead of driving the boat-or standing watch-her days were spent in two-hour meetings over ways to dispose of the trash accumulated during a fifty-one-day patrol on a ship with ten officers and ninety enlisted men and women on board. It wasn’t that she wanted to be an ensign again, but she wished, not for the first time, that she were on a smaller ship with fewer officers, where once in a while she might get to lead a boarding.

And where she didn’t have so many memories eight hundred miles off their starboard bow. She pulled her hat down to hide her expression, forgetting that it was black as the pit on the bridge, raised one foot to the ledge that ran around the radar console, and wedged herself in the narrow space between it and the control console. She put an elbow on her raised knee and her chin in her hand.

“Can’t sleep?” the chief said in a low voice.

“Dominoes,” Sara said.

He laughed. He had a marvelous laugh, which pretty much matched the rest of him. He was smart, funny, and good at his job, and if that wasn’t enough, he was handsome, too, with the most beautiful brown eyes Sara had ever seen. That wasn’t all that was beautiful about him, either. Their first full day underway she’d gone below to work out in the ship’s gym and found the chief there before her, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, far less clothing than she was accustomed to seeing him in. She’d been unable to meet his eyes for a good twenty-four hours afterward for fear that he would know exactly what she was thinking. Aside from the fact that she was an officer and he was an enlisted man, that they were underway on two hundred and eight-two feet of ship that seemed to shrink with every day of patrol that passed, and that the last thing the crew needed was to have its nose rubbed in what the Coast Guard officially referred to as an “inappropriate romantic relationship,” they were both married to other people.

Even if Sara was feeling less and less married as time went on. “Got any plans for Dutch?” she said at random. She didn’t need to be thinking about Hugh.

They were headed for Dutch Harbor the next day, their first port call of the patrol. “Seafood buffet at the Grand Aleutian,” Mark said. “Hike up the mountain beforehand to earn it.”

“No joy ride on the helo?”

The helicopter pilots took crew members for rides in port, racking up hours in the air and making friends with the crew as a bonus. “Nah,” Mark said, with the disdain only a career sailor could display toward an aviator. “I’ve been. Figured I’d let some of the newbies have a shot. You?”

“District is flying in for a briefing.”

Mark’s teeth flashed. “Oh yeah, I remember you and the captain talking about that the other day. What was it Winston Churchill said? Some thing about democracy being the worst system of government ever invented, except for all the others? Didn’t mention bureaucracy, did he.”

And he could read. Sara hardened her heart to this suddenly even more attractive man and did not reply. Instead, she thought about what she always thought about, her next duty assignment, and if she could finagle another tour in Alaska, or at the very least on the West Coast. She was terrified that she would be assigned to command in D.C. again, and was equally determined to foil, thwart, or otherwise avert that misguided effort on the part of her commanding officers if at all possible.

She’d been amazing lucky so far. The Sojourner Truth was her fifth boat in ten years, if you counted her summer on the Eagle, the Coast Guard’s tall ship, and she did. She would have her cutterman’s pin before the year was out, denoting seven years’ sea duty, which included two years’ command of a one-ten white hull out of Eureka, California. The time in D.C. had probably been essential in getting her the one-ten, she admitted, if only reluctantly and if only to herself, but shore duty was not what she had signed on for with the U.S. Coast Guard, and she made sure that every commanding officer she served under knew it. She’d been lucky in them, too, but then she worked hard at fostering the good opinion of her COs. When she had gotten the Sojourner Truth, she had showed up for duty a week early and spent that time learning every nook and cranny of the ex-navy salvage tug from bilge to crow’s nest and pestering the then first officer for every detail of his two years on board. When she had drained him dry, she started in on the engineer officer.

Blond hair, blue eyes, and long legs tended to engender thoughts other than her competency as a serving officer in the “always ready” service, but it helped that she deliberately desexed herself for each patrol, wearing her uniform a size too large, with a T-shirt and leggings beneath, no makeup, no jewelry, no perfume, no scented soaps or body lotions. Her hair she kept just long enough to wear in a ponytail, drawn through the band of the uniform baseball cap, which never left her head except at flight quarters, meals, and asleep in her bunk. She showered, she washed her clothes regularly, she was clean and neat-if only to keep herself from the unfortunate Seaman Rosenberg’s fate-but that was the most effort she made for her personal appearance under way.